Household Management

 It's supposed to be 103F today, tomorrow it's supposed to be even hotter. Summer is here. 

In the afternoon, Dave and I stepped out into the heat, just to see. It was as miserable as we predicted, in case you were wondering. I'm not great in the heat. Dave put a bit of water on some wilty looking plants and then we came inside, back into the cool embrace of the AC. Most of the day, we're hunkered down inside, wrapped around the AC and the air purifier. (There are still smoke and particulate warnings, from the wildfires in Arizona, I assume, but I don't actually know.)

We're lucky that we live in the desert and temperatures drop about thirty degrees at night. If this heat continued all night, I could not be held responsible for my actions. 

I have a distinct memory of the first time I realized that the temperature could reach 100. I was about seven or eight years old, at the community center in the neighborhood where I grew up. We were playing board games inside and I got up to get a drink from the water fountain. While I was drinking, I heard the DJ on the radio say that it was a hundred degrees. That was unusual enough for me to remember it. I had never heard of such a thing.

Now, we regularly top 100 in the summer. Thank you, global warming. (It still amazes me that people don't believe in global warming or climate change. Conservatives have managed to muddy the waters of truth to the extent that people scoff at the idea of it, which is...sad. I think it's sad and misguided. Our planet is in a real mess and people deny it because of propaganda.)

I was up early this morning and did last night's dishes and had coffee. I got on the stationary bike for a bit, then had breakfast (mashed avocado and sliced tomatoes on rye crackers with a side of Quorn nuggets for some protein). I worked in my art journal for a bit, read for a bit. I lay down after awhile to watch an episode of Monk (I'm into season four; I hate the Randy Newman theme song) and the next thing I knew, I was asleep. I slept for about ninety minutes, got up, took a shower, and prepped dinner (vegetable medley with vegetarian Italian sausages added to go on top of pasta).

Early in the pandemic we were eating a lot of pasta, too much pasta (and chips and all kinds of other unhealthy things). It's whole wheat pasta, but still. Carbs are great for stress eating, just in case you didn't know. FYI. After awhile, we came to our senses and stopped eating pasta, but that left us with about two and a half pounds of pasta in the cabinet. I'm tired of it taking up so much of our limited cabinet space, so I've been making a small amount of pasta about once a week or so to serve with a ton of vegetables. This way, we aren't carb loading like it's the end of the world and we're slowly depleting our pasta surplus. This is my version of household management.